Stairs

For the past week Dennis Keene's Crew has been at the course replacing the stairs leading to the 13th tee and the gold tees on #4 and #8. Here is a photo of the completed job on #13.

Driving Range Use

Here is a topic I have been wanting to discuss for a while. Even though we rebuilt our range five years and expanded the tee surface by 50%, we can still struggle to re-grow turf before the tees are rotated back to a particular spot. Our greatest struggle is in the winter when cold weather prevents rapid turf growth. The single biggest impact each member can have to help the situation is having a small footprint when it comes to range use. What do I mean? Create your divots in as tight as pattern as possible. I saw these two very different stalls this morning. The one golfer consumed about 6 square feet while the other consumed about 2 square feet. Bottom-line is if everyone hit balls on the range so that their divot pattern took up as little turf as possible, we would have better and more mature turf on the range year round. The first photo is the proper divot pattern, the second photo is not.

Temperature Update

For those of you keeping score. Sunday we hit a temp of 107 F, Yesterday and we hit 102. We are on a high level program of syringing greens in the afternoon to help cool the turf canopy. We also did go forward with raising the cutting height on the greens. For those of you technical people, we typically mow at .125" or 1/8 of an inch. Today we raised the cutting height to .140" or 9/64" of an inch. We continue to roll greens a couple times per week to help preserve green speed. Hopefully this heat wave will break soon. One of the few benefits to slower greens is greater number of pin placements. We can place cups in spots that would not be playable with quicker green speeds. Hopefully for the next few weeks you can enjoy a little variation in the course set-up.

Cart Path Repair

The last two days as been devoted to cart path repair. While a lot of our paths need some work, we had to select the worst areas first. This morning we poored 20 yds of concrete on the paths the run between #12 and #15. These spots had the most damage from tree roots and ground settlement. You can see our resident mason, Randy Bragdon, supervising the pouring today.

High Temp.

Just in case you were wondering...The high temperature on our weather station today was 105F and it occured at 2 pm.
I get asked a lot of which weather forecast I use. Well I look at about four different ones, especially when it comes to different models for rain in the winter. As far as getting an accurate temperature forecast in the summer I like the National Weather Service. The following link is for the Valencia Area:
http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=34.4239033407167&lon=-118.575439453125&site=lox&smap=1&marine=1&unit=0&lg=en
The triple digits are expected to continue through next week. If you come out to play be sure to drink plenty of water before and during your round. Once you start to feel dehydrated its to late! Key is to drink water and be well hydrated before heading out into the heat.

Heat and mowing heights

Well the summer heat has arrived. We are in the middle of a long extended heat wave. The last seven days have brought us temperatures near 100 everyday and the forecast is for this heat wave to continue well into next week. While we have kicked our greens maintenance program into overdrive with syringing, leaching cycles every seven days and preventative fungicide applications, our last step in preserving the health of our greens through the heat of the summer is raising the mowing height. I raise the mowing height as a last resort because in addition to slower green speeds and I feel that smoothness is negatively affected on our Poa annua putting surfaces. In order to minimize the affect of the higher high of cut we will be rolling greens two to three times a week.
To help explain the benefit and necessity to a raising cutting height I want to share something the Dr. Larry Stowell from Pace Turf has published.
" What do golf course putting greens and thoroughbred race horses have in common? More than you might think. Both are high performance products of scientific innovations in breeding and management that have resulted in faster horses — and faster greens — than ever before in history. As a result, both require specialized and intensive care to achieve their high performance levels. Like horses, turf must be supplied with sufficient nutrition, water and care. If they are lacking in any of these, they become weak, more susceptible to disease, and incapable of high performance. Without attention, they die of starvation. The importance of being green: Unlike animals, plants don’t have to obtain their food from outside sources. Instead, through the remarkable process of photosynthesis, they can make their own food inside the green tissues of their leaves and stems. All they need is sunlight, air, water, and enough green tissue, and Presto! They can manufacture enough starch and energy to fuel their growth and reproduction. But many factors can interfere with photosynthesis. On golf course greens, mowing heights that are too low are one of the most important, and one of the most common reasons that greens fail during the summer. There comes a point when the turf plants simply don’t have enough food to support the growth of roots or the production of new leaves. If the plants are mowed too low for too long, their food becomes limited, they become weak, and they eventually succumb either to
disease or starvation.
Higher mowing = recoup time for turf: While greens (like race horses) can survive extreme conditions such as low mowing for short periods of time, their long-term survival depends on time for recuperation, when higher mowing heights allow for production of new leaves, roots and other tissues.
Bottom line: Fast greens can become dead greens quickly, especially during the summer when turf is already stressed by heat. The low mowing heights that produce faster greens can remove so much leaf tissue that the plant is unable to produce the energy it needs to survive. Research has shown that even a slight increase (1/32”) in mowing height can result in dramatic improvements in turf quality, disease resistance, recovery from stress and root growth. It is therefore frequently necessary to raise mowing heights during the summer or other periods of stress. Green speeds may decrease as a result, but when you consider the alternative — that is, dead turf — it is a small price to pay."

Bunker work

Over the past two weeks we have be doing work to a few selected bunkers on the course. We started with the main bunker on the chipping green. Since it was constructed 5 years ago sand from bunker shots has accumulated on the top lip of the bunker. A lot of sand. My best estimate is that the top lip become about 12 inches higher than 5 years ago. After original construction you could see the chipping green surface when standing in the bunker. The top lip had grow some that you could not longer see the surface when standing in bunker. In order to re-establish the proper height of the top lip we removed the sod, then graded and removed all of the excess sand. It was easy to find where the original grade line was because the original grade was in soil and all of the excess material was sand. Once the original grade was re-established we laid new sod and replaced the sand in the bunker.

On the course, bunkers on holes #9, #10 and #18 received some attention. With these bunkers we re-established there original shape and contour. Years of maintenance and edging can drastically change the shape of a bunker. While the staff does a great job in trying to minimize this change, we selected these bunkers were playability may have been affected to work on first. Here is a before and after of the back right green side bunker on #9:

Weather Update.

After the month of June treated us so well with cool weather, July is taking us for a beating.
95 degrees is the temperature that we begin to kick our greens maintenance into overdrive. When the temperature reaches this point we begin to scout for dry spots on the greens through out the day and then syringe greens in the afternoon to cool the canopy.
For a recap of the Year to date; in month of May we had 5 days where the high temperature exceeded 95 degrees. In the month of June we only had 3 days. So far in five days in July, 4 of the days have exceeded 95 degrees.
So summer is definitely here. We appreciate your patience when we have to handwater and syringe greens.
For your friends that follow from Palos Verdes, we have had 4 Days this year in excess of 100 degrees. Was that a jacket I saw you wearing this weekend?

July 4th!

July 4th marks an important day for golf course maintenance here at VCC. One of our goals and objectives for the golf course is superior playing conditions from January 1st to July 4th. Now this is not to say that we slack off for the rest of the year, it is just in the first half of the year when our grasses and conditions allow us to achieve excellence. Around this time of year is when the heat starts to take its toll on the ryegrass in the roughs. The greens also become stressed from the consistently warm temperatures. In addition, we start to see the short comings of a 22 year old irrigation system. However, we still work hard to produce very good playing conditions through the rest of the summer till overseeding.
I would consider this year to be a success. Starting with Men's Team play and working our way through all of the major golf events that we host for the year and finally wrapping up with Women's Team Play and the President's cup, I feel that our maintenance staff has been able to produce to outstanding conditions for every event. And today leading into the July 4th weekend the greens are reading 11 on the stimpmeter and the fairways have a 100% turf coverage with the bermuda transition progressing nicely. My hat is off to my staff, they are the ones that get it done on a daily basis.
One interesting bit of information and reasoning for why we focus so much on the first six months of the year: 70% of the total rounds of golf for the year are played in the first half of the year.
With fewer people on the course in the next two months it allows us to accomplish some projects that can only be done in the summer months.
Starting this week we re-leveled a sunken area in #2 approach and re-sodded with bermuda grass a weak area around the drain in #10 fairway and the left side of #17 fairway.

Here are two photos from these projects


Beginning next week more projects will be under way. A few of the projects scheduled for this summer include:
1. Renovation of the large bunker at the chipping green. Sand as accumulated in excess amounts on top of the bunkers thereby not allowing the player to see the putting surface from the bunker.
2. Re shaping of greenside bunkers on # 9, #10, and #18
3. Re leveling and sodding of Lake edge on #8
4. New stairs to #4 and #8 gold tee
5. Repair of Cart path where it is shared for #12 and #15.
6. Addition of bunker sand to the greenside bunkers.


As we work our way through these projects I will be posting updates as to our accomplishments and the process that we will be going through.

Happy 4th of July!